A Tribute to Felice Lippert

I like to think of Felice Lippert as the sort of mother of The Ireland Funds. She and Sheila O'Malley and Kay Gilman and a handful of other wonderful and inspired people fashioned in New York in the late 1970's, a structure for The Funds that was to be copied in almost every other city of the 30 in which we currently have events.

It was a mixture of clear objectives, charm, hard work, arm twisting, schmaltz, utter determination not to take 'no' for an answer, and simply boundless energy that caused that group to succeed year after year.

We often joked, prior to their arrival that our first dinner for The American Ireland Fund in New York was so unsuccessful that we required a second dinner to pay for the first one. It's nearly, but not quite true, although it indicates the stern financial disciplines that were required to create events of this nature in a profitable manner.

I loved Al and Felice Lippert. They were, to me, the epitome of concerned generosity and focused good will. Al's insights into the skills and structure which broadly propelled the United Jewish Appeal to be the biggest and well-structured organization of it's type in the USA were quite seminal to The Funds, and much of our early modeling was done in its image and likeness.

Both in Palm Beach and New York Felice Lippert was the exuberant life force that made the annual miracle a reality, and the fact that last year we achieved revenues of over $3 million at our New York Gala Dinner owes greatly to the wonderful chairmanship of Bob McCann, but also to the enormous back ground work of Felice Lippert, Sheila O'Malley and Carla Capone. As Mike Roarty, in one of his memorable one-liners said at an AIF dinner, 'Who'd ever refuse to give when a Capone asks you to donate?'

Felice is now gone, suddenly plucked from amongst us. I dined with her four weeks before she died and she was, as always, full of optimism and the thrill of being alive. I will miss her greatly, as will Keith and Randy, but I will also be inspired by her - by her unquenchable spirit, by her pride in her family and by our friendship.

I would like to be remembered the way Felice Lippert is. The Ireland Funds, a gleam in our in eye back in 1976, is today the single-most important eleemosynary organization in the world dedicated to the cause of peace and culture and charity in all of Ireland. It was given over $150 million to these causes and it's debt to Al and Felice Lippert can never be overestimated.

Sir Anthony O'Reilly
Chairman, The Worldwide Ireland Funds

This article first appeared in Connect -Summer 2003 issue